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Sunday, April 29, 2018

Convicted felon George Soros launches "fact check" service in UK to be provided first to media for global fight against Fake News, will help "journalists" "push back" against politicians at press conferences-UK Guardian, 8/9/2017...Equally compassionate Mozilla and its browser Firefox start fact check service to ease our "mental burden" when, for example, choosing a US president

It is being developed by researchers at the Full Fact organisation in
London with $500,000 (£380,000) of funding from charitable foundations
backed by two billionaires: the Hungarian-born investor George Soros,
and the Iranian-American eBay founder Pierre Omidyar.

The software, which was demonstrated to the Guardian, scans
statements as they are made by politicians and instantly provides a
verdict on their veracity. An early version relies on a database of
several thousand manual fact-checks, but later versions will
automatically access official data to inform the verdict. The
researchers are co-operating with the Office of National Statistics on
the project.

The Full Fact program will be first tested in the UK but will also be
deployed in South America and Africa, where Kenya’s presidential
election campaign has been beset by fake news such as bogus BBC and CNN news reports using fabricated polls to overstate the prospects of President Uhuru Kenyatta.

In London, Full Fact is working withChequeado, an Argentina-based fact-checking organisation, and Africa Check, which operates in several sub-Saharan countries, including Nigeria and South Africa.

“It is like trying to build an immune system,” says Mevan Babakar,
project manager at Full Fact in London. “As more information goes out
into the world that is wrong, what we don’t have is the means of pushing
back against that.”

The early version of the software scans the subtitles of live news
programmes, broadcasts of parliament, the Hansard parliamentary record,
and articles published by newspapers. It tracks millions of words
sentence by sentence until it identifies a claim that appears to match a
fact-check already in its database.

The Guardian witnessed a real-time demonstration during a health
debate in parliament. Words spoken by the politicians were underlined if
they matched an existing fact-check. For example, the claim that “in
the last six years of the last Labour government, 25,000 hospital beds
were cut” flags a fact-check from the database that states: “Correct,
the number of overnight beds in the English NHS actually fell by
slightly more – about 26,000 – between 2003-04 and 2009-10”.

Another claim, that 10,000 more NHS nursing training places had been
made available is also flagged: “Incorrect. This figure refers to the
government’s ambition for additional places by 2020 on nursing,
midwifery and child health courses”.

The developers want to expand the program so that it carries out its
own fact-checks by using databases of statistics and verified
information. Work is also under way to give Twitter and Facebook users
the chance to fact-check their social media feeds, where the large
majority of the worst fake news has been distributed.

“This is an important investment in the future of fact-checking,”
says Stephen King, the Omidyar Network’s global lead on governance and
citizen engagement. “These tools will expand the reach and impact of
fact-checkers around the world, ensuring citizens are properly informed
and those in positions of power are held accountable.

The fledgling system is not without its problems; sometimes it flags
up a fact-check that isn’t relevant, for example. The challenge for the
programmers is to get the software to understand the fuzzy logic and
idiom used so often in speech.

Neither is Babakar comfortable with the idea that the system
separates the true from the false, especially since “fake” has become
associated with information people dislike rather than which is
objectively false.

“I have a problem with the word truth because that means different
things to different people,” said Babakar. “I think things are correct
or incorrect. A truth can be personal. People may say crime is rising
because it is in their area but the national average may be falling.”

The software’s aim is not to offer people conclusions, but instead provide “the best available evidence”, Babakar says."